Climate models ignored by media (except for their critics)

But greater science literacy may not make a difference.

Science on a Sphere, Whitaker Center for Science and the Arts in Harrisburg, PA

NOAA

You won’t find them next to the operating systems on the shelves of your favorite store, but climate models are pretty important software packages. They allow climate scientists to test hypotheses about the causes of climate events in the past, and they can also compute the probable effects of, say, continued fossil fuel use over the next century.

Climate is complex—there are a myriad of interconnections between components governed by different physical, chemical, and biological processes. You simply can’t stuff it all into your head and mentally work through the consequences of that interplay. That’s where computers come in. They solve this network of equations at each location on the planet, and for each time step, simulating an entire climate system at your command.

All scientists get George Box’s dictum beaten into them: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” And some are very useful, indeed. Gravitational models of the solar system, for example, allow space agencies to slingshot their spacecraft around planets and land on a moving bulls-eye more than 50 million miles away. If you’re not impressed by that, you might need medical attention.

Because of their key role in the future projections that drive public policy decisions, however, climate models have become a flash point in the popular debate over climate change. The Heartland Institute’s NIPCC report (the industry think tank’s not-so-subtle response to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports) described climate models as “nothing more than a statement of how the modeler believes a part of the world works”.

This image of models being nothing more than meaningless computer games seems to resonate with some people who, after seeing a clear weather forecast for the weekend, have instead quite literally had it rain on their parades. If we can’t predict the weather a few days in advance, the popular thinking goes, how can we know what climate will be like in 50 years?

Climate models in the media

To see how climate models were discussed in the media, a group of researchers from George Mason University analyzed stories in four of the largest US newspapers, as well as some other outlets frequented by the politically attuned. What they found fits in with the all-too-familiar state of science communication in the media—it’s not great.

The researchers first looked at articles published between 1998 and 2010 that mentioned climate change in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today. The quantity of coverage peaked in 2007, when the fourth IPCC report was released and public acceptance of climate science hit the high water mark. Yet even in 2007, climate models rarely got a mention. Over 4,000 articles (including opinion pieces) about climate change were published that year, but only 100 made reference to climate models. And that fraction continually declined through the period studied.

It’s not necessarily surprising that so few articles dig into the nuts and bolts of the science, but a couple interesting nuggets jump out. The New York Times accounted for nearly half of all stories that brought up models—likely a testament to its still-thriving science section. (About a quarter of those stories were written by journalist-slash-blogger Andrew Revkin.) And The Wall Street Journal—where many prominent climate contrarians have published opinion letters over the years—was the only paper in which the majority of climate model mentions occurred in the opinion section.

The researchers argue that this paucity of detailed coverage signifies a real problem with the reporting on climate change—it lacks sufficient explanation. Readers are too often left with a superficial understanding of the science, making it seem less authoritative.

This stems from the litany of issues facing journalism today. Tight budgets have closed down most science sections, placing the burden of science reporting on overloaded non-specialists who have neither the time nor the expertise to learn and subsequently communicate the science behind the news. It’s much easier to quote a climate scientist on one side, a contrarian on the other, and call that balance. Unfortunately, that totally ignores the only thing that matters— the balance of the evidence.

Science meets politics

The group also examined media sources favored by “high-political-knowledge audiences”. These included Time Magazine, The New Yorker, PBS NewsHour, Newsweek, NPR, The Nation, The National Review, and The Rush Limbaugh Show. In 2007, contrarian viewpoints expressed in The Nation, The National Review, and The Rush Limbaugh Show accounted for one third of the stories mentioning climate models among this group. When the researchers tallied up sentences instead of stories, they found that two thirds of the discussion of climate models took place in those outlets. And of course, those contrarian voices were overwhelmingly adversarial.

Partly because few of the voices in media are specialists, and partly because most outlets see in-depth science explanation as outside their mission of news reporting, those who spend significant amounts of time on the topic of climate models are more likely to be axe-grinders than science communicators. And they'll probably attract more attention. After all, what will draw a bigger audience—juicy, political drama or a technical dissection of the inner workings of climate models?

So what’s the upshot of this information? The dividing line of public opinion on climate change seems to be carved deeply and politically, meaning that ideological information filters insulate many folks’ opinions from the irksome effects of evidence.

But the researchers still believe that better communication can make a difference. They write, “When most of the US public is already either confused about or sceptical of the reliability of climate models in projecting future climatic conditions, providing greater access to sources of explanatory content other than opinion and political commentary may assist in helping individuals to overcome lay mental models of the science and better comprehend this form of scientific inference.”

Swings in public acceptance of climate science seem to be dominated by factors unrelated to scientific data or communication, such as political and economic events or the weather. That capricious behavior suggests that there are a number of people who don’t understand climate science well enough to form a strong opinion. Perhaps that segment of the populace could get a lot out of a more detailed explanation of the science—so long as you can get them to read it.

It's not what you know...

But what if those fickle opinions are simply uncoupled from scientific evidence altogether? In a separate study (also published in Nature Climate Change), another group of researchers tested the idea that general science literacy would correlate with concern about climate change. On this view, those who knew more about science would be more likely to key in on the concerns of the scientific community.

Survey respondents answered science knowledge questions developed by the National Science Foundation, cultural value questions (the sort used to delineate roughly “left-wing” and “right-wing” viewpoints), and rated their concern about climate change. Rather than seeing concern increase with science literacy, it diverged along cultural lines. Those with the greatest science knowledge were simply the most polarized— egalitarian-communitarian people were most concerned, and hierarchical-individualists were least concerned.

That supports what the researchers call “cultural cognition”, through which “different segments of the public… are motivated to fit their interpretations of scientific evidence to their competing cultural identities.” Those who are doubtful of supposed environmental or health problems because of their potential economic or regulatory impacts will seek out information that reinforces their position, and thus their cultural identity. On the other hand, those who are predisposed to think of industry as irresponsible will eagerly accept research that is likely to be accepted by their cultural peers.

(The framework is easily applicable to other controversies, such as genetically-modified foods or the link between tobacco and cancer.)

Of course, general science knowledge is an entirely different beast from an understanding of climate science, but the researchers argue that “simply improving the clarity of scientific information will not dispel public conflict so long as the climate-change debate continues to feature cultural meanings that divide citizens of opposing world-views.” After all, they write, “[f]or the ordinary individual, the most consequential effect of his beliefs about climate change is likely to be on his relations with his peers.”

As someone who accepts AGW, let me be the first to freely and openly admit that I only think this way because I really want the government to get bigger since I *like* the idea of there being a totalitarian entity that controls every detail of our lives!

So in summary, whether a person has more or less science knowledge, he is going to seek out and cling to information that supports his socio-political world view. Fine, but where to go from here? A previous Ars-icle talked about all people thinking they are above average. But it also said that the more knowledge a person has on a given subject, they less likely they are to over-estimate their own expertise in that subject.

I'm far right wing, but secular, and I AM concerned about climate change. However, I consider it something of a lost cause, and some of the strategies I would like to use on it - like greatly expanded use of nuclear power - don't seem to be winning politically. China and India aren't willing to play ball, and that's bad news.

My scientific literacy is great, especially when you consider the super easy questions they asked. How stupid can people be that they don't know the answers to those things. It makes me think of the Mike Judge movie Idiocracy.

I'm far right wing, but secular, and I AM concerned about climate change. However, I consider it something of a lost cause, and some of the strategies I would like to use on it - like greatly expanded use of nuclear power - don't seem to be winning politically. China and India aren't willing to play ball, and that's bad news.

My scientific literacy is great, especially when you consider the super easy questions they asked. How stupid can people be that they don't know the answers to those things. It makes me think of the Mike Judge movie Idiocracy.

China and India are in some sense playing ball, and in exactly the way you'd like to see us do it - they're building more nuclear power plants. Given their much lower per-capita energy usage than the US & Western Europe, and lower car ownership, etc., if they can make the transition, they will effect a much larger proportional reduction in their contribution to climate change. Similarly, when PV reaches parity with grid-supplied coal generation, it will be cheaper for Indians and southrn Chinese folks to buy their own generation (financed in some way) than to keep paying for it.

That transition might be hard for them, though, since I suspect their industrial needs are growing faster than nuclear plants can be built, and coal plants can still be built more quickly and cheaply - in other words, their coal usage may be increasing faster than it's being offset by nuclear generation!

Models are generally trained and tested on historical data to show that they are reasonable, and then used for prediction given certain expected variables. Models won't have perfect accuracy on the historical test data because this is usually a sign of over-fitting (which can results in poor performance on predictions or on new data) and makes the model useless.

Well yeah, that is the definition of a controversy. Unfortunately, in this case the complexity is huge! Not just the warming science complexity, but the political and practical complexity. Its not like coming to the conclusion that smoking is bad for you and you should stop if you want to increase your chances of good health. If global warming ever becomes a real threat to humanity (because it is humanity we are talking about here, lets be honest, no one cares about the environment if we are not around to experience it) then it will happen despite our best efforts to prevent it. Scary? Try investigating global cooling.

Well, duh! All models are designed to accurately model the past in order to predict the future.

The dominant climate models from 2000 even accurately forecast the climate development the last 12 years, including a temporary slow-down in warming (actually the models turned out to be a little too conservative and warming has gone faster than predicted, but then they did expect governments to actually DO something if only a little).

Unfortunately news that continue to support existing science are never brought up in the public news.

"Hind casting" the climate to my understanding is one of the ways in which models are tested.

Yes, but correct hindcasting doesn't necessarily mean that the model physics are right, because if you tune the model to give results that match past data, you may end up with model parameters that just "happen" to give the right result. It's better to look at past model performance: Hansen's prediction from the mid-1980s works reasonably well to this day, the first IPCC ensemble was famously overestimating warming (something that the misinformation crowd loves to cherry-pick), and everything IPCC has released after that is pretty much on the ball. (This is for surface temperatures, some variables have been predicted better than others.)

I was thinking along these lines this weekend - that I feel like despite my attempt to understand climate change science, there's a dearth of information that I can easily understand about the causes.

I fall on the "hierarchical-individualist" side of things (love that term), and the folks who push AGW as something I should be concerned with tend to be on the opposite side of the political spectrum, and as a result of that I'm distrustful of what they tell me.

The science-for-dummies literature I've read has made the case quite plainly that global warming is occurring - barring some sort of tin foil hat-type conspiracy on the part of scientists to lie about the data (which I give no credence to), it's definitely happening.

What I haven't seen a lot of information about that I can process in a meaningful way is how human carbon emissions are the prime driver. I'm willing to be educated, but it would be nice if I could find some sort of layman-friendly data laid out for me. I find a lot of mentions of scientific consensus and various consortia proclaiming it such, but trying to track the attributions of these proclamations back to the studies that actually say "It's People!" has been difficult.

At the risk of being one of these people I like to think of myself as fairly intelligent and able to understand scientific data, as long as it's presented in a way that doesn't require an advanced degree in earth science to comprehend. I don't want to argue from ignorance or blindly trust people whose political views align with mine simply because I agree with them on other fronts. Anyone have any really helpful information on this?

If someone is good at science, they don't generally pursue a degree in communications. That's why most reporters are the sort of people who never took the science classes in school unless they were mandatory. It shouldn't be a surprise that they are not good arbiters of what is and isn't good science. Worse, the people who do know are spending most of their day doing actual science, unlike the paid windbags that fill the air 24/7 with partisan nonsense. It's impossible for someone with real work to do to compete with someone who is paid to shill industry viewpoints.

I don't know of any good ways to work around this problem either. At a local level you can try to educate all of your friends, relatives, etc..., but it's a good way to alienate people and difficult to sustain in the long run. You will also be fighting with people who are mostly informed by said windbags and think you're trying to get everybody to drink the flouride.

Predicting the climate of the world is an insanely complex model. What most people don't seem to realize is that space effects the world climate, sunspots, high or low levels of solar radiation, etc. We can attempt to include these things in our current model for a fairly accurate *next few hours* but we don't know when these events will occur. They can easily destroy an expected sunny weekend. By analyzing patterns over the recorded history, we can attempt to integrate likely events (11 yr solar cycle) into the model creating a more likely "correct" answer.

Repulitards = Corporate Agenda = LIES. There, I said it. I'm sorry for the many sane and good Republicans who will read this, the criticism in this comment is aimed at a dangerous subset of your political side, and I truly appreciate the good efforts of many Republican / conservative people.

I bring this up because I can't escape the observation that little of this anti-science bullshit would have any thrust, any support, and largely would not exist, if it weren't for corporate backing buying politics, and hard selling outright lies. The root of this issue is a corporate profit agenda that does not give a fuck about the fate of the Earth or humanity.

I have a problem with that. The current norm in world corporate agenda amounts to a global death wish in the name of fast money. It doesn't matter that the scientists have a pretty good handle on such complex issues, because what they say indicates a potential threat to profit, and therefore must be eliminated. Even if those scientist have it wrong, there is still every reason for concern, but that does not matter to the profiteers. It is all about money to them, damn the consequences.

And if the scientists do have it right, as they almost certainly do, then the corporate profit agenda amounts to a war against the Earth and all its inhabitants. I fear that if they get their way, the dwindling remnants of humanity will look back from the polluted future and curse us for not stopping the corporate agenda at any cost. This is almost certainly suicide, and we bloody well know it as well as could be expected. The liars on the side of profit are forcefully destroying planet and people.

Why is this relevant to the article? Because the solution to this problem is not just better science communication. The solution needs to start with calling a big pack of filthy fucking lies exactly what it is, and realizing the very real and dire consequences at hand. You've got to get mad dammit!

"Rather than seeing concern increase with science literacy, it diverged along cultural lines. Those with the greatest science knowledge were simply the most polarized"

I have to wonder at that. I mean, it’s a fact that in all western countries, scientists, by and large, are a group where the left side of the political spectrum is more heavily represented. That would suggest that the people with the greatest science literacy do tend to favor one side of the fence rather than the other.

Might I suggest on a site like Ars, avoid using silly-scale imperial? "50 million miles" is useless for *everyone*. People that understand imperial only have no idea what a million miles really is, and for the people that might know what sort of distances you're talking about, at those scales we all use metric (8x10^10m, or about 0.5 AU, which instantly says "oh, about the distance to Mars").

Same thing happens at "a millionth of an inch". Utterly useless. 3 microns, on the other hand, is useful.

Might I suggest on a site like Ars, avoid using silly-scale imperial? "50 million miles" is useless for *everyone*. People that understand imperial only have no idea what a million miles really is, and for the people that might know what sort of distances you're talking about, at those scales we all use metric (8x10^10m, or about 0.5 AU, which instantly says "oh, about the distance to Mars").

Same thing happens at "a millionth of an inch". Utterly useless. 3 microns, on the other hand, is useful.

Might I suggest on a site like Ars, avoid using silly-scale imperial? "50 million miles" is useless for *everyone*. People that understand imperial only have no idea what a million miles really is, and for the people that might know what sort of distances you're talking about, at those scales we all use metric (8x10^10m, or about 0.5 AU, which instantly says "oh, about the distance to Mars").

Same thing happens at "a millionth of an inch". Utterly useless. 3 microns, on the other hand, is useful.

Strongly agree with this sentiment. One often sees utterly brainless comparisons like "as long as 3,000 football fields!" which the mind just refuses to parse.

For the "50 million miles" in the article, would not simply "halfway across the solar system" been both more evocative and more accurate?

I believe that at least a small part of this is connected to global warming denial: all those parts-per-billion and millions-of-tons are just noise to so many people.

Sometimes analogies are useful (e.g. the extra teaspoon of salt in the huge bowl of chili taking it instantly from not salty enough to way too salty) and sometimes poetry is useful (e.g. "twice around the earth") but four hundred eighty six billion trillion is just utterly meaningless.

About a quarter of those stories were written by journalist-slash-blogger Andrew Revkin.

The bolded part seems like just about the most awkward way to combine two roles with "journalist and blogger" or "journalist/blogger" being the more obvious two approaches. Is this a style guide thing?

These 'models' are ignored because they are way too easy to punk, as the ClimateGate thing proved. Yeah, I know...... fingers in ears, singing at the top of your lungs so you cannot hear it.

But the bottom line is that ClimateGate PROVED that we cannot trust those global warming true believers, because most of them are? EUGENISTS! They are trying to GULL people into going to their "WE HAVE TOO MANY PEOPLE ON THE PLANET!" bullcrap on a regular basis.

The only LEGITIMATE models that have been done show that yes, there is an INFINITESIMALLY SLIGHT increase in temperatures lately. But there an issue there too.... COMING OUT OF A LITTLE ICE AGE! So, not a big surprise in the slightest that the temperatures are going up tenths of a degree every 10 years.

"But the bottom line is that ClimateGate PROVED that we cannot trust those global warming true believers, because most of them are? EUGENISTS! They are trying to GULL people into going to their "WE HAVE TOO MANY PEOPLE ON THE PLANET!" bullcrap on a regular basis."

Eugenists? Really? No, I'm a supporter of eugenics, and it's misleading and offensive to me that you falsely include them in my beliefs, which I understand are unpopular and unlikely to become policy, but which I nevertheless hold deeply.

The dominant climate models from 2000 even accurately forecast the climate development the last 12 years, including a temporary slow-down in warming (actually the models turned out to be a little too conservative and warming has gone faster than predicted, but then they did expect governments to actually DO something if only a little).

Could you link or name the models that did predict a temporary slowdown in warming please?

These 'models' are ignored because they are way too easy to punk, as the ClimateGate thing proved. Yeah, I know...... fingers in ears, singing at the top of your lungs so you cannot hear it.

Well, you've certainly got me there: the thought that we are making changes to the Earth that could have catastrophic consequences for future generations just makes me so deliriously happy that even if there were strong reasons to believe that this is not actually the case then I would ignore them in order to continue living in my bubble of joy!

About a quarter of those stories were written by journalist-slash-blogger Andrew Revkin.

The bolded part seems like just about the most awkward way to combine two roles with "journalist and blogger" or "journalist/blogger" being the more obvious two approaches. Is this a style guide thing?

No, Scott Johnson was simply being accurate. Andrew Revkin is primarily noted for writing a blog of slash fiction about journalists. His Jennkite saga (a fugue on the Story of O with Peter Jennings and Walter Cronkite) won numerous awards.

ObTopic: what we really need is a more effective focus on the scientific method itself. Far too many news stories portray scientific discovery as some wizened geeks making grand pronouncements from on high, which foolish mortals ignore at their peril.

As someone who accepts AGW, let me be the first to freely and openly admit that I only think this way because I really want the government to get bigger since I *like* the idea of there being a totalitarian entity that controls every detail of our lives!

Because government are the only entity that could ever do that. Enjoy those really good noodles copper top :-)

As someone who accepts AGW, let me be the first to freely and openly admit that I only think this way because I really want the government to get bigger since I *like* the idea of there being a totalitarian entity that controls every detail of our lives!

Because government are the only entity that could ever do that. Enjoy those really good noodles copper top :-)

Oh don't get me wrong, I would prefer that the totalitarian entity be aliens from outer space rather than a puny human government --- but I don't like to talk about that because when I do people think that I'm crazy!!!

The science-for-dummies literature I've read has made the case quite plainly that global warming is occurring - barring some sort of tin foil hat-type conspiracy on the part of scientists to lie about the data (which I give no credence to), it's definitely happening.

What I haven't seen a lot of information about that I can process in a meaningful way is how human carbon emissions are the prime driver. I'm willing to be educated, but it would be nice if I could find some sort of layman-friendly data laid out for me.

I'll sum it up simply. CO2 and several other gases are very good at absorbing infrared radiation. You can see a demonstration of that basic fact here with a heat sensitive camera. This is how all "Greenhouse Gases" (GHGs) work. The Earth gets outside energy from the sun shining onto it. Most of that energy is not infrared coming in, but the planet soaks it up at all frequencies and has to re-emit it back into space to reach an equilibrium, where the energy coming in is balanced by the energy going out. It does that by emitting energy back out into space, in large part as long-wave infrared radiation. CO2 doesn't stop sunlight from reaching the Earth (most of it isn't in IR wavelengths), but it does stop some of the Earth's long-wave IR from escaping back into space immediately, trapping the energy in the atmosphere and raising the temperature (because more energy in the atmosphere means more heat). The more CO2 and other GHGs there are in the atmosphere, the more outgoing infrared radiation they can hold up on its way into space.

It's like having a bucket underneath a running faucet; energy from the sun (water from the faucet) goes into the Earth's system (bucket), filling it until the bucket can't hold any more water, and then the energy flows back out like water flowing over the top. Now the water coming out is the same amount as the water going in (an equilibrium), but how much water remains in the system depends on how much water the bucket can hold. A bucket with taller sides can hold more water in itself even though the amount going out ultimately equals the amount going in. If you imagine two buckets (say, a 3-gallon and a 5-gallon) underneath two faucets side by side, it's easy to visualize; the deeper bucket has more water in it even though both are overflowing. Raising the amount of GHGs in the atmosphere is like increasing the height of the bucket's walls; it keeps more energy inside the system at any given time, just like there's more water in the 5 gallon overflowing bucket than the 3 gallon overflowing bucket.

That's the core of the warming mechanism in simple terms. The basic physics of CO2 and warming are very well understood and have been known for more than a century. There are ways to tell that the current warming is mostly due to us and our CO2 emissions; we can see that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing, and when we check the signature types of carbon atoms in the CO2 we see that it's mostly from carbon that was locked up as fossil fuels for millions of years. We can check how much warming would be due to the energy we get from the sun; it turns out that this energy hasn't been increasing as global temperatures did over the last 30 years or so, so it's most likely not the sun. We can also tell that the atmosphere is warming due to more heat-trapping gases by seeing that nighttime temperatures are rising faster than daytime temps, the opposite of what we'd expect if it was driven by something besides the Greenhouse Effect. We can also see that the top-most layers of the atmosphere are cooling down and shrinking, because there is less energy reaching them from the Earth's surface; meanwhile the lower layers of the atmosphere where all the GHGs are at work are expanding because they're keeping more of that warmth. That wouldn't happen if the warming was caused by energy from the sun, which passes through both layers evenly. What about "natural variability," or in other words why isn't this just a natural warming/cooling cycle caused by other things? Because no other factors we identify can account for it. "Natural variability" is not the same thing as "uncaused/for no good reason/I don't know." We have a pretty good grasp of what causes significant climate changes and to what extent. The major mechanism for either warming or cooling are pretty well hashed out. Nothing about the way climate works explains this warming without taking into account the physics of the Greenhouse Effect and our role in raising the concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere.

"If we can’t predict the weather a few days in advance, the popular thinking goes, how can we know what climate will be like in 50 years?"

It's pretty much the same way that you can predict how much money, approximately, you'll have in your retirement account in 30 years, but good luck predicting exactly how much your Pepsi stock is going to be worth next Tuesday at 3:14 pm. You can probably also predict how long it will take you to drive to Chicago (well, the outskirts anyway), but can you tell me to the second when you will be 17 miles from your house?

Why are people unable to grasp that the small local variances of weather have nothing to do with the overall trends of climate?

Oh, wasn't that the block of code that was put in for testing purposes and commented out before the final runs but which so-called skeptics insist on pulling out as "proof" that climate modelers are up to dirty tricks?

Besides which, if the climate modelers *had* intended to deceive, then one would think that they would do a better job of being sneaky about the whole thing rather than explicitly labeling the correction as "VERY ARTIFICIAL"...

For the "50 million miles" in the article, would not simply "halfway across the solar system" been both more evocative and more accurate?

Just nitpicking, but that distance is only a bit over halfway from the Earth to the Sun (so about 0.54 AU). The whole solar system is FAR bigger, depending how you want to define it. Here's the semi-major axes for various outer-system objects, just to give you some scale:

Oh, wasn't that the block of code that was put in for testing purposes and commented out before the final runs but which so-called skeptics insist on pulling out as "proof" that climate modelers are up to dirty tricks?

Besides which, if the climate modelers *had* intended to deceive, then one would think that they would do a better job of being sneaky about the whole thing rather than explicitly labeling the correction as "VERY ARTIFICIAL"...

"If we can’t predict the weather a few days in advance, the popular thinking goes, how can we know what climate will be like in 50 years?"

It's pretty much the same way that you can predict how much money, approximately, you'll have in your retirement account in 30 years, but good luck predicting exactly how much your Pepsi stock is going to be worth next Tuesday at 3:14 pm. You can probably also predict how long it will take you to drive to Chicago (well, the outskirts anyway), but can you tell me to the second when you will be 17 miles from your house?

Why are people unable to grasp that the small local variances of weather have nothing to do with the overall trends of climate?

The analogy I read for that seemed more relevant. Here is a boiling pan of water, at the rate of heating we can predict when it will boil and what temperature it will be (within a useful tolerance) at any one time. Predicting when and where that first bubble/steam will appear is not so straightforward...

And, please tell me, in your own words, what that does/did to the final results. Otherwise, one might think you are simply regurgitating something that you don't understand in the least acting as though you've found something key...

Heck, if I wasn't sure you simply have that in your standard reply set from hacked e-mails, I'd even give you credit if you had a clue as to what language or tool that was written in.